Cardinal Caffarra: Push for “gay marriage” “undermines the foundation of a civilization”

The following statement by Cardinal Carlo Caffarra was released on July 1st (following a “gay pride” parade in Bologna and remarks by the city’s mayor) and has been translated for CWR by Alessandra Nucci:

ARCHDIOCESE of BOLOGNA – COMUNICATO STAMPA

Cardinal Caffarra issued the following statement in response to the words spoken by the Mayor of Bologna on the inevitability of an eventual recognition of marriage and adoptions for homosexual couples in Italy.

The statement by the Mayor of Bologna regarding the right of gay couples to marry and adopt children is so egregious that it warrants reflection.

What the mayor has prophesied to be the inevitable destiny of our country, to at last become civilized by recognizing the right of homosexual couples to marry and adopt, is an impromptu comment which comes cheap, since recognition doesn’t depend on the mayor anyway.

But this does not lessen the seriousness of the stand taken publicly by the person who represents the entire city.  Where do citizens who differ fit in? What about those who, not out of a phobia, but prompted by motivated reasoning, think that marriage is what has been defined as such from the dawn of civilization? Or those who think that what must be of concern to us all is not a right to adopt but the right of every child to have a father and a mother ?

Must these citizens, their culture and their arguments, really be considered uncivilized and outside the bounds of history, condemned to feeling like foreigners in their homeland, because they can’t keep up with this so-called progress?

Naturally there will be those who, mouthing platitudes about the separation between Church and State (which is a much more serious issue than this!), are bound to accuse us of wanting to impose a religious doctrine. But this has nothing to do with either religion or parties: this undermines the foundation of a civiization which is coextensive with the world and as ancient as history itself; and perhaps there is not enough awareness of how much is at stake.  

To say that to society and to children it makes no difference whether couples are homo or hetero is to deny something so obvious that to have to explain it makes one want to cry.  We have reached such a dimming of reason that we seem to think that truth can be established by law, such a blotting out of common good as to take one’s every desire to be his/her fundamental rights.

+ Carlo Card. Caffarra

Archbishop of Bologna

July 1st, 2013